Why Not Hugs and Tugs Instead of Thugs?: People of Color Interacting Positively in Picture Books

On a Facebook post dated February 26, 2014, award-winning author-illustrator Don Tate writes, “Most interesting response from a student today, to my question: What is your favorite thing to draw? He answered: Thugs.”

Tate, who is African American, was touring Texas (USA) schools when he posted the above. During his presentations, Tate draws on easel pads for the children, thus inviting them into a greater discussion involving art and their place in it. He then literally invites children up to the easel to draw their own illustrations and to tell about their work. I have seen him trade autographed drawings with a young fellow artist after another such school visit.

Back to the thug response, though: I will be honest, when I first read the boy’s answer, my initial thought to my shame was, “The kid has to be black or Mexican American.” I know, how horrible of me to stereotype, my prejudice further compounded because I myself am brown-skinned. It is a case of the pot calling another pot black, or brown. But can you blame me, really? A kid of color hardly has a chance, awash like he is in the media’s glorification of the gangster lifestyle.

After the Trayvon Martin homicide in early 2012, the word thug took an ugly turn. It no longer referred to a punk kid, a hoodlum, a trouble-maker; it was now being applied to a punk kid of a specific race, namely black. In a follow-up question from me, Tate writes about the boy’s use of the word thug:

At first I was a tad bit offended. I don’t like the term ‘thug.’ It seems to have morphed into another derogatory term meaning, for many, lowly African American male. Almost interchangeable with the n-word. All that said, I quickly realized it was my hang up, not this kid’s who, I believe, answered very innocently with no harm intended.

(Facebook Direct Message).

But race is very much at issue, whether intentionally meant or not. It is for me, anyway—I am the one whose initial reaction was to jump to conclusions. In answer to another question, Tate quickly dispelled my very skewed assumption about the boy in question: “[T]he kid who made that comment today was a square, clean-cut, nerdy-looking white kid” (Facebook Direct Message). I was summarily put in my place.

Nevertheless, I so had wanted it to be a boy of color who had said he liked drawing thugs. Then I could have made some earth-shattering statement about how the media is persistent in its feeding of such venomous portrayals of the underrepresented to a child’s detriment. The barrage, I could have argued, is non-stop, and so it only makes sense that, when asked what he would like to draw, instead of saying “butterflies and rockets and tigers and flowers,” as Tate was expecting (Facebook Direct Message), this supposed black or brown kid would naturally say “thug” because that is what he is being subjected to at every turn: in film, in television, and in music. If only we educators and parents could counteract, if not outright negate, these destructive images our kids are being exposed to by instead sharing with them only positive representations of themselves. Oh, the wonders we could do!

But the boy was not black or brown. As it turns out, he was white. And I thought, “That’s the end of that. Time to get off that soap box.”

Except, of course, for this comment by author and illustrator Cheryl Johnson to Tate’s original post: “I looked quick and I saw hugs…or tugs…. haha.” Reading Johnson’s statement served as my true aha or earth-shattering moment. That boy, his race notwithstanding, no matter his socio-economic background, whether rural or urban, without having to think twice, told Tate that when he draws, he likes to draw thugs. When pressed by Tate to elaborate, the boy added, “Like the...